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OpenMarket: August 2018

Of all the consumer products one might have expected to become a flashpoint for political controversy, the humble plastic drinking straw is an unlikely contender. Leap into the headlines it has, though, with communities like Seattle and San Francisco recently enacting bans on disposable straws. The city council of Santa Barbara, California initially voted for a ban that would have punished restaurant workers with up to six months of jail time for giving out a disposable plastic straw, but city officials agreed to revisit the ordinance when it appeared to also ban the sale of straws at supermarkets.

The Trump administration is expected tomorrow to release its proposed revisions of the Obama administration’s Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) and motor vehicle greenhouse gas emission standards for model years 2021 and later. On Saturday, July 28, The New York Times posted a leaked draft that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) sent in May to the White House for review. The question of the hour is whether the final draft released tomorrow will retain or retreat from the May draft’s bold initiatives.

After years of speculation, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) announced Tuesday that it would begin considering applications for special purpose national bank charters from financial technology (fintech) companies. The proposed “fintech charter” is an even more enhanced regulatory scheme than what was proposed under the Obama administration back in 2016, yet is an encouraging step, opening the door for online lenders to operate nationwide under a single regulatory regime.

Today, the Competitive Enterprise Institute launches its new video about the platform economy. Platforms are an ancient way of doing business—think of matchmakers, city fairs, and town markets—that bring together two or more parties to make economic transactions. Today, digital platforms allow a far wider reach, bringing together people in a way that was unthinkable just a generation ago.